Thursday, 11 September 2014

As the
Certification Review Project reaches its final stages, we need to provide some
additional updates on where we’re at and what we’re doing.

All four of
the project’s pilot case studies were completed by June and the reports are now
all available on the website. So far, we have only reported here on the
Ethiopia study, but you can now download and read the remaining three from the ‘all
document link’ on the certification page, or find them on the front page of the
website.

The project would like to thank Save the Children for hosting and providing resources and giing staff time for eth team in Pakistan. Staff provided open access to their policiers and procedures and were generous in sharing their time and opinions around how certification could improve their work.

We would also like to thank CARE Internationa (CARE) and Oxfam International (Oxfam) DRC Country offices for hosting the pilot case study in DRC. Oxfam provided transportation and logisitics support for the Kinshasa portion of the field research, and the bulk of the reseacrh was conducted in eastern DRC, where CARE provided transportation and logistics support and staff gave the study team full access to their policies, procedures and time.

Thanks are also due to Catholic Relief
Services (CRS), Caritas Switzerland and teams in Tacloban and Cebu and Caritas
Philippines (referred locally as NASSA) for hosting the study and facilitating
field visits and contacts with other stakeholders in the Philippines. We also appreciate
the role of CAFOD for its early commitment and support in the study.

Below are
some of the recommendations coming from individual
pilot studies. These ideas, comments and recommendations, in themselves, do not
convey the full extent and details of information shared, and are not
comprehensive.

These provide a small sample of what is
in the reports, below from Pakistan:

1.The model should clarify how the
assessment process will consider contextual issues that might affect an
organisation’s ability to fully meet the core requirements.

2.The project should share the detailed
findings of the draft core requirements and indicators with the CHS process so
that stakeholder’s views are considered in the subsequent drafts of the
standard.

3.Focus on the role of governments,
donors and UN agencies and the potential for alignment with existing processes
to promote accountability, quality and effectiveness in aid efforts.

Suggestions and recommendations emerging from the DRC:

1.Consider
using similar objectives and indicators, but with an alternative structure for
the model that is more familiar to humanitarian agencies and donors

2.Consider a
version of the model that can be more easily understood by disaster-affected
communities and have a more realistic “vision” of participation of communities
affected by disasters.

3.Focus more on
program support indicators that directly affect the quality and accountability
of the response.

5.Additional
field testing is needed, and the model needs to be more relevant to field staff
by, for example, contextualization by country and referencing the agency’s own
policies and codes (as long as they meet minimum humanitarian standards) and
providing a tool kit to help with implementation

Ideas and suggestions from the
Philippines:

1.Explore more ways to include local organisations. Numerous
suggestions were offered regarding ways to include them, and this means
capacity building in humanitarian action and programme management, and
exploring ways to help with the financial costs associated with certification.

2.Avoid creating an additional administrative burden as
organisations already spend significant time and resources fulfilling the
different administrative and reporting requirements of their donors and other
certification bodies. In fact, those who supported the model were often most
excited about the prospect of only having one set of requirements to follow.
For some, however, this does not seem probable.

3.Consider
expanding the model to include other humanitarian actors. Stakeholders
interviewed understand that it makes sense to begin with NGOs, but many
expressed strong feelings that it should be expanded to include other
humanitarian actors as soon as possible in order to have a larger impact on the
quality of humanitarian action.

The project team obviously found
widely differing opinions about certification and the sector’s priorities,
however, in the main, the proposal was received positively by stakeholders. The
final project outcomes, conclusions and recommendations must walk a fine line
amongst all of these in order to propose something that is realistic and
acceptable to the majority. Not an easy task!

The next steps of the project
will be to produce:

ØA finalised certification
model which includes the following: priority criteria; costs; how to fast track
certification to gain critical mass rapidly; how to manage high concurrent
demand; alternatives to the model which were considered and discarded and why.

ØAn analysis of the
implications of the proposed certification scheme from the perspective of
different stakeholders, including that of an INGO which has demonstrated its
compliance with InterAction’s Private Voluntary Organisation (PVO) Standard;
that of a national NGO which is HAP certified, that of an affected government
and that of a donor, to demonstrate what alignment with existing systems and
processes of quality assurance implies.

ØA proposed road map of what
needs to happen over the six months following the end of the project to
progress with certification.

The findings and recommendations will also be
presented at a conference in Copenhagen on 12th December 2014 - co-organised by
HAP and People In Aid, SPHERE and SCHR – at which the Core Humanitarian
Standards will also be launched. At this event, a proposal for taking action on
the findings on certification will be presented, which is intended to help
inform organisations’ decisions in relation to certification.

Monday, 24 March 2014

In middle of
February, a two-person team travelled to Ethiopia to spend several days with
the first of the project’s pilot host organisations, the Development and Inter Church Aid Commission
of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, (DICAC). The project field research is
designed to help us understand the practical implications of certification for
organisations, how it could potentially reinforce their own quality and
accountability systems and generate more information on how certification can
contribute (or not) to improving humanitarian action.

The team’s purpose
in their research was to test and validate the draft certification model’s key
assumption that external reporting, verification and certification can
contribute to improved quality, effectiveness and accountability of
humanitarian actions.

- -
determine how relevant and appropriate the
proposed model, core requirements and indicators might be to supporting those
efforts and how this could be aligned to other, external processes;

-- understand the practical implications,
risks, costs and benefits of certification for different humanitarian NGOs and
their stakeholders, and finally;

-- assess the feasibility, relevance and
added value of different options around the most appropriate model and approach
to take for certification.

The Ethiopia
visit was completely successfully, with the team working closely with DICAC staff
and other key stakeholders and partners in the country, including other NGOs,
UN agencies, donors, key government department representatives and several
groups of affected communities and representatives. The report is now complete and can be found with the other project documents.

We would
like to thank all of the DICAC staff across the organisation for all of their
time assisting us and their positive engagement with the project and our
research.

Please note: we are still seeking an organisation to volunteer
for a fourth pilot study. Costs will be covered by the project, and time in
country would be approximately 10 days. If your organisation is interested in
volunteering, please get in touch urgently!

The Certification Project Team are grateful for the considerable written feedback that we
received on the previous draft version of the model. It has been invaluable in
shaping this version, which attempts to address and clarify some of the issues
and concerns raised by your organisation and other stakeholders.

In this version,
we have responded to the feedback to the extent possible and have aimed to keep the
model as simple yet rigorous as possible. Accordingly, we have organised the
proposed core assessment criteria around three pillars: 1) Humanitarian Principles
2) Accountability to Affected People and 3) Quality, Effectiveness and
Learning, with a limited number of key indicators.

Much more
consultation is needed to refine and improve these indicators, but we hope that
this gives organisations a more concrete idea on how an organisation could be assessed
as part of a potential external verification and certification process.

We intend to use
this version as the basis for the upcoming field research and piloting phase of
the project. We aim to get the views of stakeholders in four different crisis
contexts on how certification can improve (or not) the quality of humanitarian
assistance, as well as assessing the usefulness and relevance of the proposed
core requirements and indicators.

The pilots
are not intended as a full-scale testing of the model of an assessment of
participating organisations against certification criteria. Instead, the purpose is to test and validate the key
assumptions of the model, review the assessment criteria, and gather more
detailed information on the potential costs and benefits of the proposed model
in order to improve it.

Please feel free to
share this with your colleagues, and to provide any additional comments,
feedback or critiques. The next round of feedback will continue until March 31. In particular, we would like
your views on the following questions:

1. Is this revised version closer to your vision of a successful,
sustainable certification model?2. Does it address your concerns? If not, what is missing?3. How useful and relevant are the proposed indicators and assessment
process? 4. Do you have any specific suggestions on how the indicators or
assessment process could be improved?5. Are there any critical issues that are missing or need further
clarification?Please get in touch if
you have any other questions or would like additional information.

About SCHR

The SCHR is a voluntary alliance of nine of the world’s leading humanitarian organisations. They share an aim to improve the quality, effectiveness, accountability and impact of aid efforts for people affected by crisis.